


It's Been A Long, Long Time

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Steggy Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22001671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: Steve loves so much about Peggy, about stepping back into a future that has her in it, that for weeks he’s simply dazed.
Relationships: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 11
Kudos: 195





	It's Been A Long, Long Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roboticonography](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/gifts).



Steve loves so much about Peggy, about stepping back into a future that has her in it, that for weeks he’s simply dazed. He expects the feeling to pass, the too-full feeling of contentment that presses up against his skin from the inside. But it doesn’t. 

In his first few days thrust forward in time he’s struck again and again by the necessity of learning these years in a body that never knew them. It’s as if he’s stumbled out of Erskine’s machine again; as though his elbows stick out too far and his stride is longer, his center of gravity someplace new. He should be small, but he’s large; he should be younger, but he’s not. He’s grieving Tony, and Nat, and every loss before that, grieving Bucky, and his mother, and yet the grief is tempered by the sense that he’s doing what they would have wanted for him. _Get a life, Cap_. 

Some mornings he stands and stretches out his arms just to feel his own reach in the tiny house that’s theirs. He cooks and learns the economy of movement needed for morning eggs and toast, strong tea for Peggy, coffee for himself. They eat together at a table shoved up against the wall, and he reads the paper out loud while Peggy provides commentary. It’s so ordinary he feels some days like it might shatter him, this deep, steady joy, but Peggy holds him together on the nights when he wakes, shaking with memory, and she holds him together in his happiness, too.

He relearns her body with steadier hands than those that touched her in 1944. The luxury of their bed; her soft, pale skin; the time to coax her to coming beneath his mouth, against his fingers, while he’s buried inside her is dizzying, and he loses himself in the desperate heat of her body, empties himself and shivers when she calls him _darling_. They always linger together, tangling their limbs, and Steve presses his face into Peggy’s hair or against her shoulder, and marvels at his luck.

They find Bucky, a task that’s made easier by the fact that no one expects them to be looking for him, and with Phillips’ help get him to psychologists who can help undo what Hydra had begun. Steve visits, gets to know a Bucky who hasn’t endured all the tortures of seventy years in his own intermittent ice, laughs when Bucky asks if Steve’s given Peg a ring yet. “Or a nice sidearm,” Bucky suggests, and Steve admits she’d probably like that more.

Steve pulls the Commandos back together, all of them itching for something more than demobilization can offer, and with Peggy he leads them to the Hydra cells he remembers. He has no doubt they’re missing others, that Hydra will burrow underground and rise in some other form than he knew; the world is already changed from the things he learned on the internet that doesn’t yet exist. This timeline plays by other rules, by events that unfold from the point of his return. Peggy doesn’t lead SHIELD – she’s too deep in the field beside him to consider Howard’s offer – but she does routinely bawl Steve out for stubbornness and idiocy, so there are constants that irritate the shit out of him as well as those that make him love her.

Somehow the neighbors don’t catch that he’s Cap, or care, or do the math to come up with the gap between the ice and now. As God intended, the Dodgers are still playing in Brooklyn, and there are afternoons when Steve can sit on the porch and pull on a beer, listening to the radio; when Bucky comes over and sprawls on the steps as if he were born to this life. Sometimes Peggy joins them, and when she does she’s the one who swears most colorfully when Hermanski fumbles a play.

Steve’s happy, not simply for a life lived and a rootedness found, but because Peggy is so happy too. She shows it in the tilt of her head as she listens to him, the fire in her eyes when she disagrees, the care with which she watches him when she thinks he isn’t paying attention. He’d do anything for her, shift the moon and stars if he could, but all she asks for is a partner. She loves him, and she tells him often, with an honesty that splits him open.

“I love you,” she says, from behind the crossword puzzle, her feet in his lap as he reads a book.

“Do you?” he asks, running a thumb up the arch of her foot to her toes.

She lowers her folded newspaper. “A ridiculous amount,” she offers with a smile.

Steve feels himself smiling back, and sets down his book on the rickety end table they found at the curb two Saturdays before. “There’s a movie,” he says, reaching for her hand, plucking her pencil from between her fingers and tossing it on the rug, “where I was.”

She slides her fingers between his. “There are movies here.”

“In this one, the girl tells her guy that she loves him.”

Peggy shrugs. “And?”

“He says ‘I know.’”

Peggy’s lips twist and her eyebrows rise. “Try that and you’ll find yourself . . .”

Steve lifts her hand to his lips and presses a kiss to her knuckles. “Wouldn’t want to. I mean, why not tell your best girl you love her?”

She smiles again.

He smiles back. “Wanna dance?”

Steve shifts and stands at her nod, sets the needle against vinyl, and pulls Peggy up from the couch, settling her against him, moving in time to the melody that’s haunted him for years. He closes his eyes, presses his cheek to her forehead, and she’s near and steady, trusting him to lead, and when he opens his eyes again she’s still smiling. He kisses her – or she kisses him, he’s never sure which. “I love you,” he murmurs, and she grins at him. “I know,” she whispers, and he throws back his head and laughs.


End file.
